Election Day
From Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Spirit of America
By Jackie Minniti

Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country and this world.
~Sharon Salzberg

Vincenzo Gramenzi, my maternal grandfather, was born in 1887 in Piano Piccolo, a tiny village high in the hills of Abruzzi, Italy. His parents were contadini, tenant farmers who worked the land for the wealthy padrone in exchange for rent and a small portion of the crops they grew. Life was hard and there was little opportunity for improvement. Only landowners had the luxury of pursuing an education, advancing their social standing, or having a voice in their government. The only thing the contadini could look forward to, and the only thing they could offer their children, was more of the same hardscrabble existence. But my grandfather was an industrious young man who dreamed of a life where he could benefit from hard work and have the opportunity to steer his own destiny. Fortunately for him, fate intervened in a very unexpected way.

One day, his older sister Grazielle — the only girl in a family of nine children — went out to buy wine and never came back. My grandfather later learned that she and her boyfriend, a young man the brothers didn’t approve of, had run off to America to be married. Although this incident caused a major family scandal, my grandfather secretly kept in touch with his sister. Through her letters, he learned about a country where he could pursue his dreams — where a person’s future was not limited by the circumstances of his birth. He made up his mind that somehow he would find a way to join his sister in America. (Keep reading)